Bad Luck Continues

Obviously I didn’t list everything that has gone wrong in the past few months. Some of it would be overshare, and some of it I forgot because, well, read through the list and you’ll understand. Like, a few weeks ago, I cut myself on the hundred-year-old metal band around the bottom of a piano leg and had to get a tetanus shot. That’s right, I braved a public space to get a dang tetanus shot, and it was very scary and I was very brave to get it done. I also skipped telling you about all the major household catastrophes, but I’m about to change that because we had another one happen yesterday.

A month ago we had to get the house and roof washed because of algae/mold. The whole story is longer but I’ll just say it was a pain and not cheap.

A week after that, we figured out that the outlet in the basement kept tripping because the garage door was broken and causing power surges. Getting it fixed was more expensive than getting the house washed.

Yesterday afternoon as I was watching Golden Girls, I heard two loud bangs on the wall behind the stove. It sounded like someone whipped a softball at the side of the house. The living room lights flickered, but stayed on. The sound was from the general area of where the AC unit is on the outside of the house, and where the breakers are in the basement. I thought, “I’ve heard that noise before, I bet it’s just the breakers being tripped,” and shut off the lights and AC so the system didn’t have to strain to power them. Before checking downstairs, I was going to check outside to make sure everything was ok, but when I opened the door to the garage, the motion light wouldn’t come on, and the garage opener motor was dark. I shut the door and, for some reason, went to see if the fridge was still on. It was not. This was new.

Starting upstairs, I flicked every light switch to see what was and wasn’t working. The washer was off, stopped mid-cycle, with my clothes locked behind them and no way to open it. Throughout the house, about half the lights and outlets were working. In the basement, none of the breakers were tripped. Yet. No power. I called husband, who was able to leave work to help me. When he got home, he told me to see the side of the house.

Those two loud bangs I heard was the sound of our electric meter literally exploding.

The meter box door was blown off, the wires inside blackened. There were black streaks around the box and on the house exactly as depicted in Looney Tunes when someone blows up. It smelled like hot metal cooling.

The energy company sent people who said it wasn’t their responsibility, but they did shut off power to the entire house. We found an electrician who said even if he fixed it today, the energy company wouldn’t turn the power back on until it gets inspected, and nobody can do that until Tuesday. We were looking at four days without power.

If there’s one lucky thing that happened, it’s that the house didn’t catch fire. If there are two lucky things that happened, the second is that the electrician was able to find all the parts necessary and completely fix it, just as Duke arrived again and turned the power on without an inspection. Nine at night and we finally had power again.

Apparently there’s a cluster of wires coming from the meter box that goes straight into the ground, and those wires are protected by a tube. After ten years, the soil around the house had settled in a way that pulled the tube away from the box, which pulled the wires, which exposed things that shouldn’t be exposed, and made things touch that shouldn’t, hence, splosion. The guy replaced everything and it was more than three times as expensive as either of our other house catastrophes this month. But I have power and, most importantly, it’s safe now.

If any one of these things happened this year—the deaths, the household crises, the health stuff, the broken things—it would have been a more exciting year than usual. To have them all happen within a four-month span is, frankly, insulting. Karma has had its eye fixed on me firmly for decades, to the point where I’m punished if I even consider doing something morally ambiguous. But I’ve been better behaved this year than in my entire past, and all this crap has happened.

That’s why I fear that perhaps these many, many things are actually the best case scenario. I fear that, had I not made an effort to be even kinder and more generous lately, everything would be ten times worse. Without knowing which is true, I can’t decide how to proceed. Do I thank whatever powers have saved me from a worse fate? Or am I cursed, and have to work to break it? Last night I dreamt someone had cursed me and I clearly saw and destroyed the talisman they used to do it. But I don’t think that translated into real life.

I’ll of course keep a list of further disasters, and report back as necessary. I think it might be too much to hope it remains blank.